Untitled (Wide White Space Gallery Announcements)

This photograph depicts one of 200 green-and-white striped posters Buren pasted around Paris without authorization, in the middle of the night. Buren insists the photographs in this book are not works of art, but rather, as he called them, “photo-souvenirs” of works he installed in public spaces like subway stations, billboards, and store windows.

The poster depicted here is one in a series of striped materials—including posters, billboards, fabric, and clothing—that Buren began producing in 1966. Buren considered this motif of alternating colored and white vertical stripes (each precisely 3.4 inches [8.7 centimeters] in width) to be a stand-in for painting, and hoped it would free painting from its traditional burden of having to tell a story, represent something or someone, or express emotion.

Buren hoped to liberate painting from the confines of the museum as well, by pasting them up in highly trafficked public spaces. Like other Conceptual artists, Buren was concerned that museums and galleries were assuming the authority to define art. As he put it, “The museum/gallery instantly promotes to ‘art’ status whatever it exhibits with conviction, i.e., habit, thus diverting in advance any attempt to question the foundations of art.”

An image, especially a positive print, recorded by exposing a photosensitive surface to light, especially in a camera.

Art that emerged in the late 1960s, emphasizing ideas and theoretical practices rather than the creation of visual forms. In 1967, the artist Sol LeWitt gave the new genreits name in his essay “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art,” in which he wrote, “The idea itself, even if not made visual, is as much a work of art as any finished product.” Conceptual artists used their work to question the notion of what art is, and to critique the underlying ideological structures of artistic production, distribution, and display.